How the mind plays tricks in the most complex of situations is illustrated in this novel, which the translator has brought out effectively. Debadatta, who detested everything about the place he has been posted to, suddenly realizes he has formed an attachment to the same place he thought vile.
The novel opens in a small village in Tirunelveli district in south Tamil Nadu. Our protagonist Narayanan is a shy and sensitive young boy and his honest testimony in the court of law leads to his father Sitapathi Iyer’s imprisonment. Despite his father’s misdeeds and notoriety pushing his family into penury, his virtuous mother’s upbringing and erudite teacher Rajagopala Iyer’s guidance infuse right values in him.
Renowned Hindi author Mridula Garg emphasized that writing must create disturbance and discomfort. She challenged the assumption that women’s rebellion must necessarily be directed against the home, calling this a problematic reduction. On translation, she cautioned against imposing personal interpretations that distort the original text, while asserting that she writes not ‘as a woman writer’ but simply as ‘Mridula Garg’.
. Bordeaux urges caution in numismatic studies, emphasizing the need for chemical analysis in addition to the usual focus on visual representations, scripts and the external forms of coins so as to arrive at surer conclusions. Kazim Abdullaev’s discussion, highlighting the problems when the provenance of coins is unknown, is in a sense complementary; he also touches on the untidy, and occasionally murky world of markets for antiquities. François Thierry provides a glimpse of premodern ‘numismatists’—Chinese scholars who described,
The next two chapters are about the archaeological remains of the greater Varanasi zone covering Sarnath and Saidpur-Ghazipur area on the left bank of the Ganga and Vindhya-Kaimur Hill zone on the southern side. These contain information about a lesser-known Gupta temple at Bhitari in Ghazipur district and stone quarries at Chunar and other places on the southern side which supplied sculptural and architectural elements to Sarnath and other places. Then there is a short essay on the clay bull figurines from the early historic period at Hastinapur which, according to Jayaswal, formed part of fire rituals or yagnas.
The concluding essay,
Amalananda Ghosh would be involved in the Bikaner survey, and he would present some of his findings to the Indian History Congress in Jaipur in 1951: ‘The discovery of these mounds brings the Harappa culture much closer to the heart of India and reveals how deeply it had taken its roots in the Indian soil.’ The authors however also point out that Ghosh was not, in referring to India,